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Q: What tips do you have for small and midsize businesses
on a tight budget to get started using social media sites like
Facebook and LinkedIn, along with website development and search
engine optimization?- J. Zeches

A: This is a broad list. SEO, website and social media pretty much
sums up earned and owned media. However, there is a common
thread among them.

No Miracles. There are no magic tools,
techniques or cures. Marketing has always been hard, and the
internet hasn't changed that. So when figuring out which route to
choose, follow a few simple rules. First, avoid tools or services
that seem too good to be true, as they probably are. Second, know
your resources, and spend them wisely. Lastly, pick a strategy
and stick with it.

For companies that don't have a huge budget, here's how I'd
prioritize:

1. Website: No matter what your business
is, your website is the central gathering place. This should be
your biggest investment. To ensure the best user-experience, you
should strive for your site to:

Load in zero seconds

Be usable on mobile devices and the desktop

Not waste a user's clicks or time

Never have any kind of error

Present only unique content on each page

Provide every visitor with a strong Return on Time Invested,
or ROTI. If someone visits your site, they're making their first
investment in the form of time. You must provide a return on that
investment.

Obviously, you can't completely meet any or all of these six
goals. But you can get as close to perfect as possible, and if
you get closer to perfect than your competitors, you'll
outperform them across all channels, including SEO and social
media.

When you are starting out and getting your website off the
ground, keep it simple.

Build your first site on a basic platform, like WordPress. Spend
money on making your site easy, stable and responsive.

If you need ecommerce, look at a hosted shopping-cart service
like Volusion or Shopify. Don't try to reinvent online
shopping. In my career, half the ecommerce-based businesses
I've seen fail did so before they launched their site. Think
about that. Again, keep it simple.

Before your site is ready to go live, click everything. If you
see any "not found" or other errors, like slow-loading pages
(compared to other sites in your industry), lousy writing or
broken layouts, get your developer to fix them. You paid for
something that works, not something that kind of works.

If you accomplish those goals at launch, you've made big steps
toward strong SEO and social media campaigns.

2. SEO: You should make sure your website
development takes into consideration SEO. If you built a good
website (taking into account the above suggestions) so that
search engines can easily find and classify the unique pages on
your site, I'd suggest leaving other SEO tactics alone for now.
Yes, there are techniques that help but all cost a lot of money
and resources.

That said, if you are looking to hire an SEO expert make sure
they can explain their tactics to you in a way you understand. If
they can't, do not hire them. SEO is the outcome of a lot of good
things coming together, not some secret recipe. Anyone who says
otherwise will do more harm than good.

3. Social media: As mentioned above, ignore
any secret tricks. Don't get fooled by some charlatan hawking a
$470 exclusive course on how to "dominate social media" or a
similar pitch. You are better off doing it on your own.

In a perfect world, you'd be present and responsive on every
social network. This isn't a perfect world. When starting out,
focus on one platform. I'd begin with Facebook if you're a B2C
company and targeting an audience between the ages of 25 and 55.
LinkedIn is a better bet if you're a B2B company. Twitter can
work for both B2C and B2B but only choose this network if you
know your audience spends most of their time on it. Google+ and
Pinterest also has implications for search and social.

Then, choose a time each day (morning is best) to check your
social media channel. It can be 15
minutes, 30 minutes or 5 minutes. Whatever you can spare, but
do it every single day -- without fail.

For small businesses, I know it's tempting to try a shotgun
approach. Build the website, try SEO for a little while, move to
Facebook, and when that doesn't seem to work, jump to another
social media site like LinkedIn.